My 2017 Listening Habits

A momentousness year for my household where there never seems to be enough time to listen to music. Some of my favorite artists of the last 10 years release some of their most disappointing records (looking at you Arcade Fire) and a few artists that I hope to go back to at some point (Fleet Foxes). In the year of infinite music, it becomes a challenge to focus on new records, and I find that in the CD era I may have listening to something 3 or 4 times before deciding if I liked it or not. Now, I never even made it through Everything Now during 2017.

This year, I spend some serious time re-listening to music of my childhood. YouTube provides a great conduit for live performances and I enjoyed some great stuff from my 80s favorites of REM, The Smiths, and the Depeche Mode. I thought a lot about how the music my parents listening to had a big effect on my own taste as well as the point an album became my own. An REM record I had overlooked, Live at the Olympia, fit the mode with multiple older cuts from the IRS era. An excellent document of an band in their twilight revisiting their younger days.

Two older records in contact rotation this past year was Can's Tago Mago and The Clean's Anthology. Can has been a favorite for a while, but I never listened to this one, which may be my favorite from their discography. I could listen to Paperhouse forever. The Clean take elements of the Velvet Underground and distill it down to it's base elements. If The Modern Lovers were the American take on this sound, The Clean gave us the Kiwi version. A favorite track from this collection was Secret Place.

Favorite records of 2017:

Future Islands The Far Field 
War On Drugs A Deeper Understanding
The National Sleep Well Beast
Zola Jesus Okovi
Beach House 7